AI, One Day in Our Reach

When I think of AI as a companion or some sort of life form which is synthetically like a human, the first thing that comes to mind is Commander Data from the ageless television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Commander Data, an AI android, has no emotion and has incredible processing speed to calculate and solve problems. However, his goal his to become more human because he lacks experiences humans develop over their lives. The point here is that Data is what people who in Edwards paper wanted to develop, a synthetic brain that somewhat mimics what the human brain. The hardware brain may be possible and perhaps turn out like Data, but one thing the show provided was that the hardware brain may not understand implicit human interactions. Guessing a behavior is not a mathematical equation, but an intuition that we have experienced in the past ourselves. The units in the hardware can gather information by making connections such as a neuron. One of the problems is that we have the spinal cord, which acts as a second brain for our motor skills, can be difficult for the AI brain to recreate.

            As of today, Edward’s paper is true about how AI one day can take command and control themselves without human intervention. For example, Watson that IBM created which can answer any question given to it. However, the mathematical program/code is too discrete for the mind to be mimicked. Determinism is a concept that many people believe that what ever we think, feel, and do is already determined by the course of actions in that particular situation. This concept can be easily be applied the idea that our human brain can be copied into software. However, on the other spectrum, some people believe in the free will, that nothing is determined or preset. This may be harder for an AI to mimic and perhaps too complicated for a AI to even understand the magnitude of coding that needs to go into it. To make an AI that is a tool for human enhancement is possible today, but to have an AI self aware is perhaps still far from our reach.